The "Democracy Gap" in Planning and Zoning:

why some places prosper and others simply sprawl

By Matt Leighninger

A new kind of inequality is becoming visible in the landscape of our cities and towns. In some communities, residents are exercising greater control over planning and zoning, while in others that kind of power is becoming harder and harder to grasp.

Through hard-earned experience, some planners and public officials have learned how to work effectively with 21st Century citizens. By engaging residents in deciding how their streets, neighborhoods, and downtowns ought to look and function, these local leaders have been able to foster growth and development that is broadly supported, carefully considered, and economically prudent.
In other places, local governments haven’t responded adequately to the changing needs and demands of citizens. Planners, residents, and local officials end up deadlocked over key land use decisions. With no consensus on the future of the community, the profit motives of developers determine whether, where, and how growth occurs.

The results usually aren’t pretty: blighted neighborhoods, acres of pavement, rotting commercial strips. When they can, people flee these places where democracy fails to function, moving to far-flung suburbs that seem easier to manage – and extending our metropolitan areas further out into the fields.
This growing “democracy gap” is more than just a dividing line between effective communities and ineffective ones: it further clouds the question of whether people in different places can work together on shared regional problems.
There is one fundamental reason why this gap is emerging: citizens want some control over their physical surroundings. Residents are more confident, articulate, and skeptical than ever before. When it seems like something undesirable is going to be built near them – a condo development across the street, a landfill nearby, a highway, a shopping mall, affordable housing – they will often turn out in droves to oppose it. They are more likely than ever to reject bond issues and sales tax increases when they feel that local officials aren’t listening to them. And when all else fails (or even before), people move to places where they are farther away from their neighbors and any undesirable buildings, places which at least look more tidy, homogeneous, and easy to control.

Stung by their bad experiences at public meetings, some officials are changing their relationship with residents by adopting more participatory approaches to planning. They are using several key democratic strategies:

       1. Recruiting residents for planning sessions, before a controversial land use question arises, by reaching out through community networks. They assemble a large and diverse “critical mass” of citizens.
        2. Involving those citizens in a combination of small- and large-group meetings: structured, facilitated small groups for informed, deliberative dialogue; and large forums for amplifying shared conclusions and moving from talk to action.
        3. Giving the participants in these meetings clear, unbiased information, and allowing them to consider a range of views and policy options – not just a single proposed plan.

These techniques are being employed in a wide variety of places. In large cities like San Jose, California, residents and planners have used them to redevelop neighborhoods while avoiding the unwelcome aspects of gentrification. In smaller cities like Decatur, Georgia, and Hampton, Virginia, citizens have used them to build on the strengths of their historic buildings and downtown centers. Town leaders in places like Kuna, Idaho, and Pittsford, New York have used these strategies to develop broadly shared visions for planning and economic development. And in counties like Kalamazoo County, Michigan, officials have used them to create land use plans that span entire metropolitan regions.
The field of planning and zoning is not unique: these same strategies, reflecting the same shifts in the citizen-government relationship, are emerging in other fields as well, including education, crime prevention, race relations, and public finance. The increasing power, passion, and impatience of citizens is rippling through many different communities and levels of government.

Unfortunately, most local leaders assume that their community or their field is facing unique challenges. So as they struggle to respond to citizen energy, officials tend to reinvent the wheel, discovering by trial-and-error the same strategies over and over again.

The dramatic unevenness with which planners, as a profession, are responding to 21st Century citizenship is producing dramatically inequitable metropolitan areas. Some neighborhoods and suburbs are becoming more and more attractive, desirable, and prosperous, while others decline, decompose, and sprawl.

This leads to other challenges. Citizens in democratically effective communities may become less willing to cooperate with citizens in other places: having worked so hard to improve their surroundings, residents may be more inclined to wall them off from outside influence. As challenges like transportation, waste disposal, and economic development require greater regional solutions, the democracy gap may make that kind of collaboration harder to achieve.
The answer is not to discourage these instincts toward sovereignty and local control, but to apply democratic strategies more universally and more evenly. Planners and public officials need to understand that they are not alone: leaders in different communities and fields of practice are all dealing with the same conditions, and they can learn a great deal from each others’ successes and mistakes. Leaders also need to look beyond city and town lines, and mobilize citizens on a region-wide basis to address region-wide challenges. The democracy gap doesn’t just divide the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’ – it threatens the welfare of us all.